


(don't read) the last page

by windflicker



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Akechi Goro Lives, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 07:56:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16036235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windflicker/pseuds/windflicker
Summary: It’s colder than Tokyo here, so there’s a light coating of snow on the ground, still thick enough to remain obstinately white over the fields. He’s sitting in Akira’s room, on Akira’s bed, looking out over the monotonous pastures of northern Japan, and absurdly, Goro thinks of Santa Claus.(Goro visits Akira for the winter, and the Phantom Thieves have a party.)





	(don't read) the last page

Winter vacation, the first time they all make it to Akira’s place after he moves back home, his frustratingly nice two-story house in the ever-idyllic countryside. Home. The word tastes odd on Goro’s tongue, intrusive and transient all at once, like pinpricks of snow stinging his skin. All the more offensive now that Akira’s _home_ is miles away.

It’s colder than Tokyo here, so there’s a light coating of the substance on the ground, thick enough to remain obstinately white over the fields. He’s sitting in Akira’s room, on Akira’s bed, looking out over the monotonous pastures of northern Japan, and absurdly, Goro thinks of Santa Claus. Of the frivolous joke he had made on TV that fateful day, of the magical man who rewarded the children who were good enough every year without fail and punished the ones who were not. Childish fairytales he had carried with him far longer than he should have. _I.e._ , the way he does everything.

The air is still buzzing with laughter, though the rest of them are gone. They had showered Akira with goodbye hugs at the door, flakes of snow mingling with his hair and the shoes on the genkan. Akira is downstairs talking to his parents, so Goro waits amidst the distant spurts of water and clang of dishes, Sakamoto’s shouts and Takamaki’s poorly stifled crying still ringing in his ears. He can still see them, all of them, wrapped in their scarves, can still see Niijima waiting outside, phone in hand to make sure they all catch their train, can see Sakura perched on the floor, jamming her feet into those ridiculous boots of hers.

“We’ll miss you, man!” Sakamoto had cried, burying his face in Akira’s shoulder. Akira laughed and humored and deflected and Goro hovered patiently nearby, ready with a polite smile and words of parting. He was grateful, for the record, that no one attempted to hug him.

He draws his knees up in front of him now, perched on Akira’s bed, a contrast to his usual prim posture, one leg crossed over the other in practiced elegance. This is suspiciously comfortable. Despite the length of his stay, and the amount of it spent in here, he still isn’t accustomed to Akira’s bedroom. After the attic with its Spartan furnishings, despite Akira’s best attempts—admittedly, Goro had liked the stars speckled across the ceiling—this is cozy and well-worn, threads fraying and sweat stains seeping at the edges of fabric, well-loved. An apt reflection of Akira.

“Hey.”

Several inches of unkempt hair announce Akira’s arrival louder than his padding footsteps, socks against wood. Once a thief, always a thief. He flashes a smile at Goro, crooked, unthinking, a little sleepy, and a flood of warmth suffuses his body. 

Akira’s smile is easy as always, with that sly edge that had kept him pegged as a delinquent for far longer than his grades and generally innocuous behavior would have otherwise allowed. A pity. Goro and his agenda had been lucky for his own wide-set eyes, his gentle features.

“Would your parents like any help?” he asks, sitting up with a smile.

Akira shakes his head. “Nah, it’s fine. You’re a guest here, you know.”

With a gratuitous flourish truly reminiscent of the old days, he sinks down on the bed next to Goro. He feels warm, radiates it, the way he always has, even with his absurd habit of occasionally neglecting to a wear a shirt under his hoodie in the depths of winter. Goro tries not to make a metaphor out of it. Nor the hoodie.

“But I’ve enjoyed their hospitality for longer than the others,” he protests, holding up a hand. “It’s only natural I should help out.”

There are bottles of milk tea and Fanta strewn across the dining table downstairs, amidst eight bowls lined with grains of rice hopelessly adrift in the dregs of nabe—and a ninth smuggled onto the floor—half-eaten bags of chips and plates scraped of their strawberry frosting and a questionably tall stack of empty Jagariko. The Phantom Thieves never were a tidy bunch.

Dinner with them had been…well. “This is _sooo_ delicious! You know, we never had your welcome party, did we, Akechi?” Takamaki had piped up midway through a mouthful of rice, and for a moment, if only, to their credit, the briefest moment, the whole table quieted. She gulped. “I-I mean…”

“No,” Goro said, chewing thoroughly and then swallowing completely, “I suppose not.”

 _“_ Well, then this is a welcome back party,” Akira said, raising his paper cup of tea in the air, one corner of his mouth tugging upward. “Welcome back.” And that was the end of that.

Akira waves a hand now, the lines of his body loose and relaxed against the bed. “Seriously, don’t worry about it. You wouldn’t believe the amount of times Mom’s already told me I should be more like you.” Goro buries the instinctive pleased shiver at those words.

 _Hosting their son’s attempted murderer under their own roof? How macabre_ , another voice in his mind laughs.

Back when he was still a regular at Leblanc trying to flirt his way into confidence, significance, whatever it had been, Goro had often wondered about Akira’s parents. How did they feel, shipping their sixteen-year-old son off to the big city for a year, branded with such ignominy? He and Akira had never talked about it—no, it was only his own mother who had slipped into the conversation, he mused sardonically; how thoughtlessly he had spilled the secret he tried to keep from the world while Akira stayed close-lipped about something everyone already knew—but he knew they barely even kept in touch. He had kept his eyes peeled for them, wheeling his suitcase up to Akira’s house with apprehension coiling deep in his stomach and fingers clenched too tight around the handle, for the people who had sent him away so heedlessly and flung him to the winds. 

Instead, Akira’s parents gave the impression of two fretful birds, ordinary and pallid, blending into the environment with almost Darwinian aptitude. They welcomed Goro warmly and seemed to genuinely care for their son, and yet they also seemed to keep him at arm’s length, as if they couldn’t quite comprehend him and were vaguely afraid to try. He was starting to understand why Akira was the way he was: a sharp-edged mirror facing the rest of the world, mutable, receptive, tactically forgettable.

The envy came, but it came meekly, like a poison he was used to swallowing by now, resigned.

“Well, if you’re certain it’s all right,” he says, amicable.

Akira nods. “Plus,” he adds with a grin, “Morgana’s busy entertaining them anyway. Let him have his moment.”

“Ah, so that’s where the cat went. I see.”

“He’s become such an attention ’ho, now that he doesn’t get to have so many people around all the time. And Mom and Dad always spoil him.” Akira slaps a hand to his chest, mock-wounded. “Oh, how people change.”

Goro rolls his eyes. “Oh, please. I always knew you were the lax type of leader. Always dragging your feet through Palaces and leaving our meetings _so_ close to the deadline. You’re just a bad influence on our feline friend.” 

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with taking your time,” Akira argues. “And it worked out fine in the end, didn’t it?”

_Fine, you say?_

Goro, curled up in Dr. Takemi’s clinic, choking down her concoctions and bedridden in agony for weeks. _Fine._ Physical therapy until he could bike again, though bouldering still made his shoulder twinge. _Fine._ Video calls that filled the space, the empty swaths of time, so much time, but were never enough. _Fine._ A visit during Golden Week and one during the summer. Sprawling next to Akira, their legs tangling together, getting too competitive over Mario Kart, laughing over some idiotic movie Goro would never have watched on his own.

“I...I suppose.”

“Hey,” Akira says suddenly, stretching his fingers out to graze the back of Goro’s hand, and maybe he’ll never get used to this, the way his heart stutters and somersaults at the touch, “you’re okay with this, right?”

“With Morgana? Well, I can’t say he was ever my favorite Phantom Thief, but he certainly wasn’t at the bottom of the list.” He cracks a smile, eyes crinkled. “I suppose being a cute cat worked in his favor, though I must admit I do prefer dogs.”

Akira snorts. “Admit it, you’re just jealous he gets to spend more time with me.” 

Goro bites back a smile, a real one this time. “No comment.”

“But seriously.” His fingers crawl forward until he’s covering Goro’s entire hand, until all his skin is swathed in soft, glowing warmth, and Akira turns to face him, earnest. His chest swells uncomfortably, so bright and open it nearly hurts. “The others. I know we talked about it before, but…you’re okay with them, right? With tonight?”

Goro stares back at him with the steady eye contact he had perfected, to throw people off-balance as easily as to earn their trust. He studies Akira’s face, his pale skin, his gray eyes capable of clouding impenetrably or glittering with devious laughter or glaring back, sharply defiant. The fringe he tugs at when he’s thinking or nervous, his ridiculously long, pretty eyelashes. It had taken him a good month to get used to Akira’s face without the glasses, to see him without the new, reinvented self he had donned as light and easy as plastic rims. It softened his lines and angles, but somehow it made him look older as well.

His own self still clinging to his shoulders, draped over him like a torn, heavy cloak, he looks away.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” He tries to keep his voice light, instead of the rather clipped edge that emerges. “You realize I can simply walk out the door anytime I want.”

“Well, duh. Physically, you could. But emotionally…imagine the toll,” Akira drawls, and mimes being stabbed again, falling backward onto the mattress this time.

“Oh, please. I imagine you’d survive.” _You always do._ He looks down at his own hand, thin and frail beneath Akira’s. _On the other hand, I…_

“No way, honey.” Akira shakes his head and pouts up at him, eyes heavy-lidded and sultry. “You know I wouldn’t last a day without you.”

“Oh, stop. You’re insufferable.” But Goro has to press his lips together to keep from laughing, has to swallow to stem the surge of something that feels suspiciously like relief.

“You know you love it.”

Wordlessly, Akira tugs at his hand. Sighing, Goro obliges him, leans backward on his elbows and lowers himself to the bed until he’s lying next to him, still linked by their fingers, their feet dangling over the edge.

They stare up at his ceiling, no stars this time, nothing but the gentle off-white wash of an ordinary room. Surprisingly, Akira’s room is primarily blue-themed, not the red that Goro has come to associate with him. But of course, Akira wasn’t always Joker. He doesn’t even have much of a social life back home, which had both infuriated and amused Goro when he found out.

He wonders idly if Akira hasn’t gone back in some regard, reverted to some previous state of being, some mask he had retired on a shelf before but could pick up again on a whim. He wonders, with the usual streak of terror, almost pitiful now in its unoriginality, if soon Akira won’t need him anymore.

“I know it’s not the most, uh, comfortable or natural right now,” Akira says after a moment, “but they’re okay with it, too. With you. Really. It just takes time. These things take time.”

It’s easier to talk about this when Goro doesn’t have to look at anything but the ceiling. The words are a breath between his lips. “I know.”

It’s not as if he cares, as if he needs or deserves it. December; nine months after Akira left Tokyo, a year after Goro had his scrape with death, seven months since they first saw each other again. Time spools by in his mind, a chronology that consists largely of pain and idiocy and regret. But in the midst of it all, there’s also a boy arguing in a bright-lit crowd, a high five and dazzling twirl in a garish den, a cup of coffee on a rainy night.

Goro can hear Akira breathing next to him, can smell his warm, boyish scent. The world is quiet here, sounds muffled by the falling snow. Yongen-Jaya was hardly a bustling hotspot, but rural quiet, Goro has learned, is another matter altogether. In this large, ordinary house in the wide, empty _tabula rasa_ of the countryside, there is nothing that he needs to do, no one he needs to impress, no one he needs to be. With no singular driving force to propel him, he is, in some ways, more lost than he’s been in years. The thought makes him feel as if he’s drowning in emptiness, unanchored and floating, lungs turned inside out.

He inhales, a tad sharp. “Can I ask you something?” The usual polite pause. “Do you—like being back here, Akira?” 

“You mean back home?” Akira hums in thought. Goro shivers involuntarily at the low, pleasant timbre of his voice. How embarrassing. “I mean, I miss Tokyo. I miss my friends, like, a whole lot, all the time. I miss—more than anything, I miss _you_.” He scoots closer, bumping their shoulders, and Goro’s breath catches, every nerve suddenly alight. “I don’t miss not having a door, though.”

He smiles up at the ceiling. “Yes, a door does make certain things easier, doesn’t it?”

Akira’s mouth falls open, surprised, and then he shoots him a fond, dashing smirk. “Well, I can’t argue with that. But…” He sighs and turns back to the ceiling. His fingers shift around Goro’s, restless as they often are, twirling a pencil in endless circles, balancing his phone on a razor’s edge the way he used to his dagger. “Well, I guess after everything, I don’t feel _trapped_ here. And I felt that way for a while. A long while.” Goro tenses. He knows. “You know exactly what I mean.” _Ah_. “After I got back from prison…”

Goro grits his teeth. Like everyone who tried to do something good, or who simply wanted to live their lives as human beings in peace, he had to suffer for it, too. In solitary confinement, no less. Adults truly were disgusting.

Akira pauses, glances over at him and squeezes his hand. “After I got back, I needed—I dunno. A change of scenery. Open space. After everything got so messed up with the Phantom Thieves and the whole city was so _obsessed_ with them, it was like—like it was everywhere, in the streets, in the water, in the shops and restaurants, everywhere I looked, chains and cells and—” He shudders. Goro squeezes back. “And besides, there are things I have to catch up on here, too.” He lets out his breath. “I just need to feel like a regular guy. Just for a little while.”

 _But you’re not_ , Goro thinks despite himself. _You’re the most special person I’ve ever met._ Far more special than he, with all his fame and scheming and desperation, had ever managed to be, which, yes, still stings on levels he doesn’t care to admit. But that, he knows, is also precisely the problem. Akira, the fearless leader, who had borne the weight of humanity’s sins on his shoulders simply because they were there before him and he felt that he should, without a single word of complaint, all too extraordinary for his own good without caring a single whit about it.

“I do want to go back. I _will_ go back, someday. I’m a real city boy now, you know? You can take the boy out of Tokyo, and all that.” He grins. “But for now, I could use this. I need to just…breathe.”

“I understand,” Goro says, though the words sound laughably inadequate to his ears. “Just know that whenever you do come back, I...will be there. I—I promise.”

The rest of the words lodge in his throat, useless as he for all his charming ways and manners is when it comes to something like this, but he’s grateful that Akira, the man of few words to his many, lifts his hand to his lips and plants a kiss on the back, a true gentleman thief.

“I’ll be looking forward to it, Goro,” he says, voice soft.

It isn’t even worth trying to quell the wave of warmth that envelops him at that.

They lie in silence for a while, Goro’s hand resting on Akira’s chest, their fingers intertwined. Maybe it was only fate after all and a megalomaniac god who had joined their hands in the first place, and maybe that game should be over by now, the story finished. Maybe Goro Akechi should be long dead and not here at all, forgotten, chewed up and deemed worthless and then discarded by the entire world the way he had always feared. But, he thinks, as long as there is someone like Akira Kurusu to hold on to him, he might last a while longer yet. He might just overstay his welcome on this wretched, godforsaken earth, in a final act of rebellion. Existence itself can be a curse, an accident, the hand of destiny. Why not resistance as well?

“Oh, but real talk,” Akira pipes up after a while, turning his head to look at him, “don’t tell Morgana about the dog person thing, okay?”

“Really?” Goro can’t help but chuckle. “Of all the things in this situation that could possibly cause you worry, that’s what you’re most concerned about?”

“Hey, he’s sensitive, all right? And he’s my cat. You weren’t there yet, but there was this time when he and Ryuji—”

“You’re always so much more talkative with me than with the others, aren’t you?” Though his cheek is pressed against the mattress, Goro does his best to flash a winning smile. “And here I thought I was the gregarious one between the two of us. I wonder why that is. Should I suspect anything, Joker?”

“You got me, Detective. I knew you were the real thief of hearts all along.”

“Mm. I _am_ the better flirt.”

“Uh, okay, I’m gonna stop you right there.” Akira holds a hand up, and in their position he looks like he’s saluting the ceiling. Goro can’t help but snicker in an awfully undignified manner. “I was only able to look past your terrible lines because of how unfairly attractive you are.” He opens his mouth. Akira squeezes his hand. “Take the compliment, Goro.”

Goro opens his mouth again to argue, then decides against it, concealing his smile. _I’ll do you one better._

Instead, he shifts onto his side and rests a hand on Akira’s cheek, watching as his eyes widen and then soften, lashes fluttering, and leans forward to press a kiss to his mouth.

“Oh. Uh. Okay.” Akira blinks, looking several shades less than smug for once. Goro takes a moment to savor the victory, not even bothering to hide his smirk. “Yeah, that works, too.”

“You should get used to it, because I assure you, there’s plenty more where that came from.”

“I’ll be holding you to that, Crow,” Akira says, matching his smirk, and kisses him again.

Outside, the snow paints a new face on the world, the same yet ever-changing, and the hours roll onward, never-ending.

**Author's Note:**

> title from new year's day by taylor swift, which also heavily inspired this fic.
> 
> dear atlus, pls let akira deal with his trauma...
> 
> thank you for reading! come hang out with me on [twitter](http://twitter.com/foolsjustice) and [tumblr](http://justicefool.tumblr.com), where i continue to weep over these two. kudos and comments are deeply appreciated!


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